Silhouettes, So Far And Close
The Clientele: 'I Dreamed of You, Maria' + The haze of early parenting + The old becoming new + The new becoming old + Steamrollers + Meat-grinders
‘There I was: me, ground up inside myself.’ On being seen by music amidst the transformations of early parenthood.
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Silhouettes So Far and Close
Last summer I occasionally found myself searching for the right simile — or even just a good simile, a passable simile — for how my life had changed since my daughter, our second child, was born and we found ourselves, as people sometimes say of the hyper-involved early years of parenting, really in it. I wanted something that captured the mix of novelty and repetition and acceleration and slow-motion and energy and fatigue, the changed shapes of my days and my weeks and my months, the pressureful transformation I felt myself undergoing — but also how, amidst all that transformation, I kept stumbling on my old self. (Hey! I know you…) I wanted the special pleasure of hearing my new experience named.
For a while, I liked steamroller, which nicely evoked the experience of life pushing on me slowly and steadily, reshaping me into something new.
But steamroller had its problems. I didn’t really feel that, in becoming a parent, I was getting flattened. At least not all the time.
Meat-grinder. I liked meat-grinder, too. Something goes in — a person, me — and gets made into something else: another person, with different dimensions and texture but recognizably made of the same stuff. I’d changed. My days looked different, felt different. I slept differently, woke differently, read differently, wrote differently, listened to music differently, related to time differently. But I was still… me.
When I happened to lose myself in a book for a few minutes, I was connected to every previous time I’d lost myself in a book. When I was moved to tears by a song for no reason I could name, I was connected to every previous time I’d been moved to tears by music for no reason I could name. And so on. There I was: me, ground up inside myself.
The problem with meat-grinder was that it was too pejorative. It got at the extremity, but not the fun. Getting put through a meat-grinder sounded like something that happens to someone in a horror movie.
I thought I might find my simile in the world of blacksmithing, where tools get melted down under extreme heat and reshaped in the service of a new purpose. They shall forge their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-knives. A 38-year-old man shall start getting up at 5 a.m. most mornings. You see what I’m getting at. But I didn’t know enough about blacksmithing to nail the phrasing.
One day, driving around doing errands, I listened to the new Clientele album for the first time. It was a bit disorienting. I’d been following the band for at least 20 years and had a clear sense of what to expect. Alasdair MacLean’s trademark vocals, ethereal and melancholy. Trebly, serpentine lead guitar lines. Most of all, the sense of listening to some bookish romantics playing live in a London backyard (or backyard shed) facing out on Hampstead heath at dusk, soundtracking the day’s inevitable slip into darkness.
This new album was different. I’d read somewhere that it was the first one the band recorded on a computer. That made sense. I heard electronic beats layered in with the analog kit. I heard what sounded like… drum’n’bass samples? On the third track, “Garden Eye Mantra,” the singing in the chorus seemed to be electronically processed in a way that made them deeper and more droney, less like “Clientele vocals” (as I knew them) and more like Gregorian chanting:
Out in the dark, the hatchbacks are rolling
Windows unwound, the cigarettes glowing
The blue air and silhouettes, so far and close
Nobody knows where the garden eye goes
It was recognizably the Clientele. But I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it was a Clientele song handed over to a DJ or electronica producer for remixing. Did I like it? I wasn’t sure. Part of me, I realized, just wanted to hear the Clientele doing their familiar thing, a warming balm of the known against the exhausting disorientation of parenting. But I didn’t like admitting as much. I’ve always believed that it’s a band’s job to try new things, and listeners’ job to at least give those experiments a chance. I didn't want to be another middle-aged dude who only listened to what he liked back when he was 20, and still open to the world.
So I kept going. Maybe in another universe, one where my car was newer and I could control the music from my dashboard or steering wheel, I might have given up on the new Clientele right then and there. Instead, in this universe — in my 2010 Honda Civic — I stuck with it.
Toward the end of the album, the feel of things tips back toward “old Clientele” – now imbued with the drama of a reunion. I once read a yoga instructor’s description of how the most interesting parts of becoming a more advanced practitioner come in part from learning how to hold the more complex and difficult poses, but just as much from revisiting the basic poses that everyone knows, finding surprising new dimensions within them. That’s sort of what this felt like: old Clientele, but somehow enhanced by the experience of the band having pushed itself to try something else.
Towards the end of “I Dreamed of You, Maria,” the album’s penultimate song, I felt a strange sense of deja vu.
Out in the dark, the hatchbacks are rolling
Windows unwound, the cigarettes glowing
The blue air and silhouettes, so far and close
Nobody knows where the garden eye goes
It took me a few repetitions to figure out that I was listening to the same words from the chorus of “Garden Eye Mantra” (now 15 tracks on the rearview mirror), but without the heavy vocal processing or any of the other new production touches. Realizing this, I pumped my fist in celebration. Not because I hated the newer-sounding stuff — not at all — but because this was what I’d been looking for in my simile search. Life wasn't a steamroller, wasn't a meat-grinder, wasn't a blacksmith’s studio. It was, it seemed in the moment, exactly this: the journey from “Garden Eye Mantra” to “I Dreamed of You, Maria.” The next day, life was also the experience of going back to “Garden Eye Mantra” again the next day, this time more familiar with the arc it sets in motion. It was melodies repeating from one song to the next, now distorted, now clean. It was the old being replaced by the new, but also resurfacing within it. The old was becoming new again. The new was becoming familiar, becoming old. Is there a word for that? ✹